Salt Slow Page 6
After that, I found she came for me often, waiting patiently outside the school the way parents did, sometimes settling down with her chin on her paws, swatting her tail at horseflies. My Stepmother, after her initial panic the first time she had found Helen missing, was surprisingly cheerful about the whole thing. Nice to see you girls getting along, she said, whilst my Father noted vaguely that it was preferable to letting me walk home alone.
+
We became friendly, if not to say filial. I took to brushing her fur until she bit me, fed her white rolls and anchovies until her stomach distended and she threw up on the dining-room floor. My Stepmother showed me how to bathe her on Saturday mornings, how to pumice the dead skin from the pads of her feet. There’s a girl, was my Stepmother’s most common refrain and one I found myself mimicking, soothing the wolf’s irritation when filing down her claws.
I became familiar with the hunch of her body – the heavy ridge of spine and the way the fur became coarser towards the middle. Sometimes, sitting reading in the kitchen, I found she would clamber up beside me and turn pages at random with her tufted snout. Her smell varied, depending on the day of the week – fleshy, sharp, strangely vegetal. By degrees, I came to take an odd pleasure in mirroring her gestures, raising and lowering one shoulder, swallowing things without first chewing, drawing back my lips to expose the teeth.
She took to catching bats, at night in the midge-infested garden, bringing them in at peculiar hours and laying them at my feet. They were gory little offerings, dank-furred and often still twitching. My Stepmother disapproved and wouldn’t let me keep them, scooping them up with her dustpan and depositing them on my Father’s compost heap. It wasn’t ladylike behaviour, she said, though it wasn’t clear whether her problem was with Helen catching the bats or my accepting them. I managed to rescue one, just once, sneaking out in an earthworm-scented dawn before my Stepmother woke and fishing the bat from beneath a pile of garden waste. I tried to dry it out beneath hardbacked books, the way my sister had taught me to do with flowers, and kept it the way I kept my letters, pushed down between the wall and the bed, until it came to smell so badly that my Stepmother found it and threw it away.
Sometimes, when the weather was cold, I slept with Helen in the room my Stepmother had set up for her, across the corridor from my own. She slept beneath a twin bed which my Stepmother made up neatly every morning, despite the fact the sheets were never slept in and the covers undisturbed. The smell beneath the bed was thick – body smell. I pressed my face each night into Helen’s shoulders. She slept a jittery, doglike sleep, whined softly, snapped at nothing. I often imagined her dreams – subterranean, worm casts, a greenish undergrowth.
+
Whenever we had guests over, my Father would display Helen in her party dress – his exotic Stepdaughter, her interesting table manners. His friends were poets and visual artists, they asked my Stepmother serious questions about the urge to Motherhood. Old as the earth, a man who had once exhibited a series of photographs of undecorated driftwood informed her, swilling Côtes du Rhône, the maternal desire, the natural order of things.
My feral girls, my Father would say if Helen and I appeared together, pulling the wolf onto his lap and suggesting I sat at his feet – a broad artistic joke. I was older, taller than I had been. The middle and fourth fingers on both my hands had grown to the same length and my eyebrows met in the middle, which caused me less embarrassment than a certain sort of shifty release. The hair grew too fast to pluck and so I let it go and let my legs and armpits perform a similar trick. At school, a girl who typically sat beside me in French class complained that I smelled and asked to be moved across the room. I continued to get into fights, although now when I did the teachers seemed less inclined to see my side of things.
At my Father’s dinners, my Stepmother typically sat at his right and fed Helen with her serving spoon, leaning sideways to pass me pieces of meat from her plate. My Father served his guests a lot of salted beef, ox tongue, duck breasts still bloody in their jus. I liked his cooking more than I had in previous years, a fact which I owed both to the maturation of my palate and to the fact that meat, stolen away and buried in my bedclothes, settled down in time to a hard iron smell that I found I enjoyed very much. I had started my period on the evening of my fifteenth birthday and had eaten the steak my father served, near-raw, in a fit of jubilation. There’s a girl, my Father had said, tipping the leftover juice from the grill pan onto my plate. Helen, who by this time was nearly out of adolescence, had sat by me through dinner in a muted splendour with a party hat cocked around her ears. It was at this dinner party, held in my honour, that a guest of my Father’s – a renowned poet and radio philosopher – had caused a scene by knocking over the salt cellar and, in his haste to retrieve it, brushing his hand over Helen’s flank. As she had with the boy outside my school, Helen had immediately locked her fangs around his wrist – not unpleasantly, but still enough to make him shout. My Father had laughed at this and reminded his guest not to upset his daughters, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand.
+
At the age of sixteen, I became of unexpected interest to a boy in my class named Peter who told various people he was in love with me and took to following me home at a distance of about a hundred yards when I left school for the day. The kind of boy who grows too fast and too abruptly over the summer and returns to school war-torn and alien, Peter was largely solitary; a characteristic which perhaps encouraged the misguided view that I had anything to offer him. The fact that, most afternoons, I had a wolf beside me during my walk home rendered Peter’s omnipresence only nominally unsettling, though occasionally when I stopped, to tie a shoelace or to readjust my bag, he would stop too and only start again when I did. That’s boys for you, my sister wrote on a postcard showing Raphael’s Annunciation, always on the horizon. We hadn’t spoken in a while and the cartoon in the corner of her message showed a girl rather taller than the ones she had previously drawn. It was standing with its hands behind its back, its hair demurely plaited down one side.
Helen was fully grown by this point and had long since lost her baby teeth. The process of losing them had been fractious, uneasy, a season of waking in the night to her dragging her jaw along the floorboards beside me until her teeth came away at the root. Her adult teeth were sharper, vampiric in a way my Stepmother regarded with concern, if not outward anxiety. Now and then, she presented Helen with tough things on which she was encouraged to gnaw – coconut shell and softened slabs of pumice, all the better to blunt her harsh new mouthful. Over time, Helen would grow bored of these objects and nudge them over to me. I would pick them up to make her happy, fit my teeth to the sides of a coconut shell and bite.
The Conservationist’s Guide noted that wolves, at the point of sexual maturity, are liable to develop more alienating, predatory behaviours, and that domesticated wolves have a tendency either to draw away from their human companions or to become markedly more territorial around them. It was difficult to tell, at the time, whether either of these situations was particularly the case. By the time she had lost her baby teeth, Helen was not behaving notably differently to the way she had behaved before, although she did become more selective with the clothes in which she allowed my Stepmother to dress her and grew oddly snappish on the rare occasion I received a letter from my sister.
+
My Father published a new novel, dedicating it to me and to Helen, describing us as my twin girls. My Mother rang him up to berate him for leaving my sister out of the dedication. It was a Saturday, Helen’s bathing day, and I listened to my Father’s side of the argument from my seat on the kitchen floor. It was your decision, he said more than once, you chose one and not the other. So did she. Moving the pumice stone idly over the base of Helen’s left forepaw, I thought about the evening my sister had packed her belongings, the expression like the cartoon girls she was so fond of sketching – flat and colourless, still-mouthed. What do you expect, my Father said rep
eatedly, what do either of you expect.
The phone call ended abruptly and my Father banged into the kitchen, pausing in what seemed like a high temper to observe the bathing ritual. Sitting patiently with her forepaws on the tub’s edge, Helen cocked her head to one side and then the other, her ears today encased in a miniature yellow bathing cab which seemed to amuse my Father. He shook his head, moving across the room to a place on the counter where he kept family photographs and removing a snap of me and my sister at the ages of seven and eight from its frame. This he looked at for several moments before dropping it into Helen’s bathwater as unconcernedly as one might stub out a cigarette. The photograph warped quickly in the soapy water and Helen dabbed at it unconcernedly, making no particular effort to rescue it before it sank. My Father moved out to the front of the house for some air, returning a half-hour later to relate in his novelist’s voice that Mr Wintergarten had now moved on to kidnapping and stuffing neighbourhood cats, if the commotion from next door was anything to go by.
+
Walking home one afternoon, followed as usual by Peter, Helen took it into her head to butt at the backs of my knees until I understood her intention to change our usual route. I complied almost unthinkingly, crossing roads as she willed me and circling through unfamiliar streets, although at several points when I looked back, Peter was still following us and by the time we reached home, Helen was ill-tempered and flat about the ears.
At school, it occurred to me to confront him about following us, though when I did he only grinned and told me I should expect a certain level of interest if I would wander around with a wolf in tow. It was shortly after this that he started stealing pencils from my desk when he passed me to take his seat in the mornings, picking them up as casually as if he’d left them there for safekeeping. The third or fourth time this happened, I jumped up and snatched the offending item back before he could retreat to his desk. I opened my mouth to demand an explanation but found as I did so that the disparity between our heights made him somehow difficult to argue with, a shadow too long to entirely avoid.
+
The nights seemed larger by the age of sixteen, a curious sense that the strangulated skies of my childhood had suddenly been granted room to rage about. At full moon, Helen would go out into the garden and howl, the way that wolves are wont to do in movies, and she encouraged me to join her, dragging on my trouser legs until I accompanied her onto the lawn. Full-mooned nights brought with them a very particular ozone smell, a nitrous, liquid atmosphere that turned my hair to greasy curlicues. When she had howled her fill, Helen would prowl the garden in a strange, custodial circle, snapping at fireflies. Did you girls have fun, my Stepmother would ask us afterwards, sitting up at odd hours in the kitchen with her cup of orange tea.
You never write enough, my sister said – a cartoon of a girl, somewhat anachronistically, waiting by the telephone – I feel like you’re forgetting about me. I wondered for a long time how to respond to this or to communicate the purge of her image that my Father had recently undertaken in all corners of the house. In the end, I filed the letter away like the others, pushing Helen’s snout aside when she slunk up as if to read over my shoulder.
+
A month or so before my seventeenth birthday, I got into a fight at school. A group of boys with names like Callum and Jeremy had broken into my locker some time before the lunchtime bell and had swiped the box of tampons I kept hidden beneath a towel. The situation was a desperate one, an ooze and panic, dark smear along the back of my school skirt. I lined my underwear with thin school toilet paper, folded seven times, but the moment was torrential, hot fright between my legs, a spreading stain. At the end of the day, I sought out those I suspected, pushed Callum or Jeremy between the shoulder blades – stumble against the chain-link fence. We fought the way dogs do, open-mouthed, heads back and rearing. I smashed the heels of my fists upwards without looking, felt one connect – something wet and hard and quite like bone. Someone caught me in the side of the face with the corner of a schoolbag, an explosion like a hand driven into soft fruit, my vision sent marbling across the tarmac. I’m not sure how the fight ended, only that the crowd that had formed around us had dispersed by the time Helen found me and that I was alone when she did. She nosed into my side, licked one side of my face where something that had formerly felt solid now felt shaken loose. I found myself thinking of my sister’s letter: try harder, don’t be such a beast.
I had to fist my hands in Helen’s fur to pull myself up, though she made no obvious objection. I caught something of my own smell mingled with hers, the dirt in my knees and the fact that between my legs I was still bleeding unchecked, a terrible falling away. We walked home together, a little laboriously, only stopping once when Helen tipped her head over her shoulder and I, following her gaze, saw that Peter was following us at his usual hundred-yard remove. I remember Helen lifted her head towards him, only a minor curl of her lip but enough to reveal the teeth, and he seemed to falter, before appearing to decide that this pause was invitation to move closer. He was, I saw as he approached, bearing the box of tampons that had gone missing from my locker, the ones I had assumed had been taken by the other boys. He raised his chin a little defiantly as he held them out towards me. It was just meant to be a joke, he said, his tone seeming to follow the set of his chin, though his words were nominally apologetic, badly judged, had no idea. I didn’t mean for it to get so out of hand. Then a blur of action that was hard to follow – his hand passing over Helen’s head in the way that she hated, the curl of her upper lip. Several weeks later, when he had been off from school long enough to make people curious, we heard that his hand had gone septic and that surgeons had ultimately had to remove the whole thing at the wrist.
+
In the aftermath of the incident with Peter, I went into my bedroom and found that Helen had ripped up all of my sister’s letters and was sitting amongst the wreckage gently nosing her way through the shreds of cartoon girls, some stretching or skipping or bowling or rowing boats. I said nothing to this, only reached to stroke the hard, high ridge of her back, the familiar smell rising from her fur as I did so. Since the evening of the fight, when we had both returned home bloodied, my Stepmother had developed a habit of bathing me in the tub usually reserved for Helen and the scent of it – hot, bodily beneath bluebells – now seemed indivisible from the one I recognised as my own. Apparently satisfied, Helen turned to grate her jaw along the floorboards; a gesture like a sharpening – serrated knife against a block. The moon, I felt, was not yet full enough to excuse this kind of behaviour, but by degrees I nonetheless sat down beside my feral sister and joined her in dragging my teeth across the floor.
Stop your women’s ears with wax
1.
They wear glitter in Manchester – a queue like a Chinese dragon winding up past the traffic lights. Mona watches them hop from foot to foot, sharing chewing gum, straggle of autumn in their summer haircuts. Slips of chorus start and echo backwards, girls passing lyrics down the line. Fingernails the colour of honeybees, bottom lips daubed with gold. Barrier girls, one of the roadies tells her, they queue for hours just to get to the front.
She takes her camera out to film short segments for the band’s website. Three girls caught a bus at six this morning and have been hanging around the civic centre since nine. It sounds extreme but we wouldn’t do this for just any group, you know? Further back, a gang of girls barely older than thirteen bare their teeth like knuckles and claw their fingers at the lens. We’re the original fanclub. The OG. Other people say they started first but it was actually us. We liked them before it was cool.
It starts to rain at six thirty – lurch of hoods and umbrellas. Those without are scooped sideways by companions, tucked under sleeves and into coat panels. The queue mutates into a travelling sideshow; two-headed girls in plastic macs, chimera-blooms of arms and hands as groups protect bareheaded members from the rain.
Doors at seven, mushroom of bodies.
In the mirror-panelled foyer of the civic centre, they take photos of themselves in groups, sticking their tongues out. Hands are stamped and hip flasks confiscated – No Alcohol Purchased Off The Premises tacked at the foot of the stairs. Teenaged girls, tangle-handed, shoving through the inner doors. Melting nylon smell and anticipation sweaty at the upper lip, dark-ringed armpits – a keening, keeling, racing forward towards the band the band the band.
Later, back on the tour bus, Mona edits her footage together, intercutting her shots of the queue with sequences of the show and backstage. A tour diary, the management had requested, when they first took her on as video producer: intimate access, behind-the-scenes, the fucking thrill of it all.
On her laptop screen, Mona watches a clip of the evening’s encore. The band – their long hair, their flaring nostrils – reappearing to the kind of clamour Mona has only ever seen reserved for the Beatles; weeping female fans in strips of documentary footage, fingers reaching up into eye sockets, digging down with a violence made slippery by tears. It is not a reaction she is used to seeing for a girl band. The scrabble, the sweat behind the knees. On the screen, she watches as the lead guitarist raises her hand for silence; a wide, extinguishing gesture which is swallowed up into the end of the clip. Skipping back, she watches again, focusing her attention on the audience before the shot cuts back to the stage. Pausing the video, she squints down towards the bottom left hand of the screen, noting two girls holding up a third who has fainted and now hangs between them, glitter-cheeked and livid to the lips.